Work, management, economics, politics, control systems, state-of-the-art technologies and the culture industry are the many ‘worlds’ that Julien Prévieux’s activities involve. As in the Lettres de non-motivation (Letters of Non-Application) that he has been sending out to employers regularly since 2004 – in which he responds to newspaper advertisements and details his reasons for not applying for the jobs in question – his work often appropriates the vocabulary, mechanisms and modus operandi of the sectors by which it is informed, the better to highlight their dogmas, excesses and, when all is said and done, their vacuousness.

By shrewdly adopting the stance of an individual facing whole swathes of society that are, in many respects, dehumanised, Prévieux develops a strategy of counterproductivity, or what the philosopher Elie During called, in a recent essay about the artist’s praxis, ‘counter-employment’.

The various crises and scandals that have staked up over the past decade have meant that the arcana of the world economy have become a must – and favourite subject – for Prévieux. Thus, his series of drawings entitled A la recherché du miracle économique

(In Search of the Economic Miracle, 2006) took as its point of departure three excerpts from Das Kapital by Marx, which the artist subjected to the ‘bible codes’, a decoding technique used in different periods in history to bring out hidden meaning in sacred texts. From each of the three excerpts there develops a network of key words – crash, bankruptcy, laundering, downward spiral, monopoly, audit, and so on – prophesying different financial disasters, past or future. More recently, Prévieux’s interest has veered towards what has been described by the media as ‘the swindle of the century’, namely the Bernard Madoff affair. For Forget the Money (2011), the artist managed to acquire part of the disgraced financier’s library, in the wake of the auctioning of goods seized by the FBI.

This collection of 100 or so books, made up mainly of bestsellers, thrillers and airport novels, might be deemed insignificant in other circumstances, but now has a special aura. Perusing the covers, a reading emerges that, with hindsight, cannot fail but see in titles such as No Second Chance, End in Tears and White Shark signs -foreshadowing the fate of their former owner.

Christophe Gallois, curator of the Mudam Luxembourg

Le Lotissement
2009-2012
6 1:10 scale model of the project on a grey base
Polyamide
Approximatly 7,9 x 7, 9 x 5, 9 inches

Extract of Think Park- an article by Raphael Brunel for 02
By his interest in places that inspire thought, Julien Prévieux brings to the fore, resurrected from layers of history books, biographies and other myths, an unusual form of grey matter. On the way, (metaphor of a cerebral stroll and romanticising in the open-air) he opts for the solitary and private place, that cave of modern times close to the average house: the hut, the garage, the garden shed, so many structures built without plans or foundations, in which many an artist, philosopher and scientist have retired to work. He reproduces them identically on a small scale and paints them a grey which makes them look less like a maquette than the software programme that formalised them. The exhibition place thus becomes the theatre of an improbable secret meeting between Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Virginia Woolf and Gustav Malher, of a state-of-the-art place dedicated to thinking – one of those ambitious interdisciplinary projects we are always being promised more of. However, nothing appears to filter out or emanate from this Lotissement/housing development. The façades remain strangely silent, closed in on themselves. The Lotissement by Julien Prévieux wavers between ghost town, a park of miniature monuments such as the chateaux of the Loire, and think tanks, those idea laboratories where experts work for the common good. It is alternately a tribute to small architecture, a monument of the history of inspiration, a simple document and a didactic tool of museum policy